The Second Period of Application—1800-’40. Steam-Locomotion on Railroads.
Fig. 40.—The First Railroad-Car, 1825.
Introductory.—The commencement of the nineteenth century found the modern steam-engine fully developed in all its principal features, and fairly at work in many departments of industry. The genius of Worcester, and Morland, and Savery, and Desaguliers, had, in the first period of the application of the power of steam to useful work, effected a beginning which, looked upon from a point of view which exhibits its importance as the first step toward the wonderful results to-day familiar to every one, appears in its true light, and entitles those great men to even greater honor than has been accorded them. The results actually accomplished, however, were absolutely insignificant in comparison with those which marked the period of development just described. Yet even the work of Watt and of his contemporaries was but a mere prelude to the marvellous advances made in the succeeding period, to which we are now come, and, in extent and importance, was insignificant in comparison with that accomplished by their successors in the development of all mechanical industries by the application of the steam-engine to the movement of every kind of machine.
The first of the two periods of application saw the steam-engine adapted simply to the elevation of water and the drainage of mines; during the second period it was adapted to every variety of useful work, and introduced wherever the muscular strength of men and animals, or the power of wind and of falling water, which had previously been the only motors, had found application. A history of the development of industries by the introduction of steam-power during this period, would be no less extended and hardly less interesting than that of the steam-engine itself.
The way had been fairly opened by Boulton and Watt; and the year 1800 saw a crowd of engineers and manufacturers entering upon it, eager to reap the harvest of distinction and of pecuniary returns which seemed so promising to all. The last year of the eighteenth century was also the last of the twenty-five years of partnership of Boulton & Watt, and, with it, the patents under which that firm had held the great monopoly of steam-engine building expired. The right to manufacture the modern steam-engine was common to all. Watt had, at the commencement of the new century, retired from active business-life. Boulton remained in business; but he was not the inventor of the new engine, and could not retain, by the exercise of all his remaining power, the privileges previously held by legal authorization.
The young Boulton and the young Watt were not the Boulton & Watt of earlier years; and, had they possessed all of the business talent and all of the inventive genius of their fathers, they could not have retained control of a business which was now growing far more rapidly than the facilities for manufacturing could be extended in any single establishment. All over the country, and even on the Continent of Europe, and in America, thousands of mechanics, and many men of mechanical tastes in other professions, were familiar with the principles of the new machine, and were speculating upon its value for all the purposes to which it has since been applied; and a multitude of enthusiastic mechanics, and a larger multitude of visionary and ignorant schemers, were experimenting with every imaginable device, in the vain hope of attaining perpetual motion, and other hardly less absurd results, by its modification and improvement. Steam-engine building establishments sprang up wherever a mechanic had succeeded in erecting a workshop and in acquiring a local reputation as a worker in metal, and many of Watt’s workmen went out from Soho to take charge of the work done in these shops. Nearly all of the great establishments which are to-day most noted for their extent and for the importance and magnitude of the work done in them, not only in Great Britain, but in Europe and the United States, came into existence during this second period of the application of the steam-engine as a prime mover.
The new establishments usually grew out of older shops of a less pretentious character, and were managed by men who had been trained by Watt, or who had had a still more awakening experience with those who vainly strove to make up, by their ingenuity and by great excellence of workmanship, the advantages possessed at Soho in a legal monopoly and greater experience in the business.